Mental Blabberings

Until very recently I believed that I needed to be on top of the latest news and happenings not only in my field (computer science and software engineering) but also in as many things as I can be on top of. This meant subscribing to all sorts of magazines, newsletters, YouTube channels, Twitch streamers, watching TV and live sport events, etc. — I was on top of a lot of the latest happenings, trends, news, interesting developments. I was having fun and I felt busy. What I did not feel was particularly effective nor productive. I felt like I was consuming so much information with the thought that it might be useful someday. When I was younger this wouldn’t have been an issue but I realised that ever since I’ve started taking stock of what I’ve been spending my time on, that a lot of it I’ve been spending just staying on top of things that I really didn’t need to be on top of. This article is about some of the realisations I’ve made in the course of exploring this issue of “FOMO” or

I was so moved today by the prospect of a passion project that I took some time on a Friday night to get it done. Let me present the #RedJeans project over at redjeans.org . I've found myself wanting to work on a project that came purely from the heart and one that was very dear to me, something that is personal, and connects with a larger community of people in the world. The idea for redjeans.org came to me as a hint when I was writing up my reflection for 2018. I realised that I didn't spend quite as much time identifying with and working with a community. I did a bit of soul-searching and found that one of the activities I really enjoyed and cherished in years past is donating blood -- and I keep wondering why not more people do it. It was an idle thought but then a conversation with someone where I described why I wrote down "donate blood more often" in 2019 became an idea where instead of just me doing it, how about if I get my friends to do it too ? I left

Have you ever played a sport whether individual or team sports where your top performance was required for any measure of success? If you have, you may have had the benefit of at least one coach guiding you to point out better form, better strategies, alternative approaches, keeping you accountable, identifying our strengths and weaknesses, and overall telling you to listen to your body and focus on your goals. If you haven't then would you like to have someone on your side, not judging you then generally cheering you on while you attempt to achieve whatever your goals are? For the past year I've been working with a life coach and I can say it's worked so well for me that I cannot help but recommend everyone consider investing in life coaching. I used to swim back when I was a student in university as part of the varsity team. I had a number of coaches then who taught me not just the technical aspects of swimming, but also the mental fortitude required to train effectivel

It's 2019 and I just realised that I've not written on this blog for a long while. I feel a little bad about this so I'm picking it back up again. More importantly, I've limited my social media to just Twitter (I've deleted all my Facebook-related accounts) and will be writing more on the blog instead of engaging in other social media sites. If you want to reach me directly, you can also reach me through my keybase.io account for encrypted communication. If you have my phone number, you can also contact me through Signal. Quite a number of things have happened in the past few years and here's a quick update on things that I can share: I've been working on XRay , a function call tracing system now part of the LLVM project . This took a good two and some years of my time at Google. Most recently I've moved to the Chrome Operations Team still here in Google Sydney. I can't give specifics yet of what I'll be working on, so stay tuned. There'